Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!

by Bob Harris

  Rubber cement.

  The slab called a pitcher’s rubber in baseball.

  The rubber arm a durable pitcher is said to have.

  Rubbernecking at a car wreck.

  Rubber checks that bounce.

  Rubber tires.

  Peeling rubber with a sports car. You can also burn this kind of rubber.

  There’s the birth-control prophylactic meaning.

  Rubber rooms for the insane.

  Rubber gloves, as used in electrical work or in surgery.

  The rubber man in a circus.

  Rubber galoshes, which we called just “rubbers” when I was growing up.

  Rubber balls.

  “Rubber baby buggy bumpers,” a phrase that made me laugh as a kid.

  Rubber chickens, like the kind you find in gag gift stores.

  The “rubber game” which decides a series of baseball games.

  Rubber rafts.

  Rubber erasers—what pencil erasers are called in some countries.

  Rubber-tree plants, the kind upon which ants reportedly base high hopes.

  Good enough. That’s twenty-one. Now let’s strip away the rubber bits, and gaze at the incredibly diverse stuff we’ve just conjured:

  Elastic bands

  Bank checks

  Shoes

  Car parts

  Bouncing

  Balls

  Approval

  Sporting events

  Baby talk

  Stamps

  Tires

  Chickens

  Cement

  Peeling

  Gag gifts

  Slabs

  Burning

  Decisions

  Durability

  Sex

  Rafts

  Arms

  Gloves

  Erasers

  Gawking faces

  Contortionists

  Trees

  If someone had asked you yesterday how to connect “chicken” with “cement,” you’d probably have given them a blank stare. But it was already in your head.

  This little game of Six Degrees of Your Own Skull shows that nothing exists in your head by itself. In fact, it’s hard to find anything that isn’t connected in a hop or two.

  Just for style points, let’s look back at the list and pick the three most unrelated words we can find, and see how they also connect in completely non-rubber ways. A few jump right out:

  “Cement” + “trees”: there are trees in cement planters near the coffee shop where I usually write.

  “Trees” + “shoes”: you can find a shoe tree in any department store.

  “Shoes” + “cement”: OK, that’s just an episode of The Sopranos.

  This is no coincidence; it’s a direct result of the structure of the human brain. Visualize it this way: imagine the word rubber floating around in the center of the room you’re in. Now mentally attach all the connected words, arranged so that they’re evenly spaced, floating around the center, flying like kites in all directions. Now try to picture all of these other words as the centers of their own little kite-spheres, all at the same time, with dozens of their own connections floating around them. And all of these, of course, are centers of their own connection-spheres.

  The room gets full pretty damn fast, doesn’t it?

  It’s impossible to imagine how dense all the connections really are. Your brain isn’t arranged like a book or even a hard drive, but like the Internet, with millions of interlinking entries and perhaps the same percentage of dirty pictures. You could probably spend a lifetime finding new connections and ideas, just by playing around with what you already have.

  Happily, the more you goof around in there, the more connections you’ll have, and the faster they’ll work. If you’ve ever wondered how Jeopardy! players can find their way to some wildly obscure answers, this is a big part. I’ll give some examples from my own games a little later.

  And so we reach another step on the Eightfold Path:

  1. Obvious things may be worth noticing.

  2. Remember the basics: the basics are what you remember.

  3. Put your head where you can use it later.

  4. Doing nothing is better than doing something really stupid.

  5. Admit you don’t know squat as often as possible.

  6. Everything connects to everything else.

  This is handy. When we combine this with the knowledge that visceral, least-common-denominator stuff is incredibly sticky, it really is possible to start uploading data faster than you might have imagined: Just free-associate until you find a way to connect new stuff to old stuff, using sticky, visceral, primal imagery as the glue.

  You’ll see a few examples soon. And don’t worry: most of my memory-jogging mnemonic images are perfectly repeatable in front of the kids. When all else fails, however, I’m not above the private creation of some incredibly silly, dirty mental jokes (like the bodice-ripping link between Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe) about everything from Cabinet Departments to Philosophers to Shakespeare. A complete list will have to wait for another book. Written under an assumed name. While I’m drunk.

  This book will be bought by undergraduate students at the most respected schools in America, even though it will only be sold in black plastic bags by skeevy men in the dicey part of town.

  The movie version, however, will get Uma Thurman an Oscar.

  So which rubber-connected item did I buy from the J. H. Gilbert Company of Willoughby, Ohio?

  We can eliminate a few things from our list right off. They probably didn’t sell circus freaks, rubber chickens, or people who gawk at accidents. I’d remember taking those home. Metaphorical uses of rubber are an unlikely retail item, since they’re hell to stock. Rubber trees would be a waste of space, especially without little glassine envelopes of highly hopeful ants.

  That still leaves at least a dozen things to go looking for.

  The J. H. Gilbert Company itself has an address near my parents’ house, in a moist area near Lake Erie known as the “Snow Belt,” a phrase that should be understood as dry understatement, the way “Mississippi” is the Algonquian word for “Big River.”

  The first half of my life was largely spent in the Snow Belt, which stretches from the easternmost suburbs of Cleveland to, roughly speaking, Minsk. Our small white house was about halfway in between, at the edge of the watershed of a large sodden marsh that lies on the rim of the vast gray lake.

  This was where I first played Jeopardy!, tapping my finger against my thigh, every twelve seconds, while shipwrecked on Mom and Dad’s couch.

  People in the Snow Belt live under a notorious atmospheric quirk: frequently, moisture rises from the unfrozen water, cools in the north-westerly breeze, and gets dumped back on the ground inland as snow. No actual storm is necessary. It could be perfectly clear in downtown Cleveland—close enough to reach by bicycle in a day—but the small white house might be sinking under a fresh new layer of powder.

  Winters in the Snow Belt seemed to begin around mid-July, lasting through August of the following year. This was called the “lake effect” by attractive people under warm TV lights downtown. Folks in our neighborhood preferred more colorful terms.

  That’s not to say there weren’t seasons in the Snow Belt. We could always tell when spring had arrived by the sound of the first robin being swallowed whole by a large mosquito. And each autumn, Dad and I would stop cheering for a last-place baseball team, shifting our allegiance to a football team with no hope whatsoever.

  Summer days in between (and most years had at least four or five) were marked by torrential downpours caused by the convection currents stirred up by Little League games. Each afternoon the air would turn tropical: thick, motionless, and humid enough that you might expect dinner to be a passing duck that had fallen from the sky, fully steamed and ready to eat.

  On summer evenings we kids would play, finally, chasing lightning bugs and splashing in puddles and slapping ourselves, constantly, to stop the mos
quitoes. As the night would grow darker and the mosquitoes would thicken, the slapping would slowly accelerate, until we realized that slapping had become our main activity. Then it was time to go in for the night.

  Sometimes, in advance, we’d smear ourselves with drugstore-bought sprays. Every new springtime brought bright metal cans adorned with festive pictures of dying insects. These made fine promises. These never quite worked. And every yard had its torches and candles and glowing red spirals, reeking of chemical orange stink, shamanistic totems to ward off the bugs. These never worked, either. Slapping still seemed the most practical method.

  That, and the bug truck.

  Most of the mosquitoes in the Snow Belt were no larger or more aggressive than, say, a rabid cat with wings. So it was possible to fight off the insect horde with our bare hands. But there was also, eventually, the wholesale approach: our town frequently doused itself and everything in sight with organophosphate poisons.

  The fashionable toxins of choice, I would learn thirty years later, were called cholinesterase inhibitors. Large chemical companies will proudly tell you that these kill bugs quite dead by shutting down their neurological systems, inducing fatal little insect convulsions, but yet have, mind you, no effect whatsogoddamever on the neurology of children whose developing skin and lung tissues might become saturated on a daily basis.

  Children like my sister.

  I only have the one. Connie. She’s five years older than me.

  She’s a talented musician, reliably able to produce a happy noise by blowing in one end of anything wooden with holes in it. Usually this involves a flute, but over the years I’ve brought her odd little contraptions from about nine different time zones, and dang if an hour later she isn’t close to making some distant python start shaking its reticulated booty.

  I just wish she could visit all the places the hollow bits of wood have come from.

  One of the highlights of the annual warm summer night was the bug truck coming to spray. This was exactly what it sounds like: a big tanker thing, filled with poison, which would creep slowly down the street, its little nozzles spewing a sickly sweet mist in all directions.

  Common sense apparently wasn’t invented until some time later.

  I still remember kids playing in the street as the truck went by. Their parents were sitting on doorsteps, many of them drinking beer, apparently talking about something other than what their children were being exposed to.

  I still remember the smell. I suppose if you were curious, you could take a bottle of bug spray off the shelf, whiz a few blasts around at eye level, and suck in a lungful or two just for flavor. But I do not recommend this, although it would be a good time to wear rubberized safety goggles from the J. H. Gilbert Company of Willoughby, Ohio.

  A decade later, Connie posed for a senior prom picture I still have. There’s a wide hopefulness in her eyes, and an intelligence sharp enough to cut right through the suburban photographer’s arty Vaseline-on-the-lens blur technique.

  Not long after posing for that picture, Connie began to feel strangely weak, and her limbs became somewhat less reliable.

  I’ll spare you most of the following years.

  You might be amazed how many different medical tests are capable of not telling you a thing. Most seem to involve large needles. It took almost a decade of probing and poking and lab-coated chin-stroking before finally Connie found a doctor who, puzzled at his first results, didn’t reassure his own ego by quietly muttering it was all in her head.

  Maybe ten years ago, the symptoms started getting more complicated. We’ll never know exactly how it all overlapped or what developed when.

  The early symptoms seem to line up with what you’d expect someone with Goddam Idiot Bug Truck Exposure to have. At least as far as we can tell, which isn’t far. But later symptoms look more like autoimmune problems of some sort. I say “of some sort” because autoimmune thingies are themselves a medical guessing game.

  For a year or two, Connie definitely, absolutely had multiple sclerosis. Until she probably didn’t. Insert a new diagnosis every eighteen months or so, followed by a half-panicked home study course in Whatever the Hell It Is Now. Lather, rinse, repeat.

  Each time, I would sit up at night, reading and studying and trying desperately to put this three-pound crinkly organ inside my skull to some earthly use. Trying to think even harder was the only defense I could come up with:

  If the cholinesterase inhibitors were the original cause or a complicating factor, maybe it would help if we just did a better job of maintaining her acetylcholine levels… there’s a study that shows these can be manipulated by dietary intake of choline… choline is a component of vitamin B3… I dunno, maybe I should get her a big tub of B3 and see if that helps… Oh, wait—is that backwards? Maybe that would just make things worse. I wish I knew what to do…

  Too bad the Jeopardy! categories rarely include AUTOIMMUNE DISORDERS. I would rule.

  Fortunately, sometime between the prom picture and starting to fall down a lot for no reason, Connie was smart enough to marry a fellow named Rich, who has the patient resolve of a lighthouse. He’s extremely skilled at driving to hospitals at night in the rain. Somehow in all this they’ve managed to raise two wise and kind kids who can beat me at any board game in the universe.

  So things are more than OK. Things are good. Things are great.

  Sometimes, though, I notice Connie’s prom picture. I look at that young girl, just about to dance off into the future. She’s still completely unaware of the hard left turn coming up. I want to warn her, or save her, or at least tell her to memorize how good her body feels right now, so she can replay the memory far into the future.

  I think about what my sister has gone through since, year after frightening year. I feel guilty about my own perfect health. I think about how steady Rich has been. I marvel at the kids they’ve still managed to raise.

  Sometimes water comes out of my eyes when I think about it.

  Like right now, as I write these words. I’m sad and I’m happy and I’m angry and I’m grateful, all at once. I’m proud and I’m scared. And most of all, I’m so unable to do a goddam thing to change it all.

  It’s surprising how much water you actually have in your head. Entire buckets can pour out sometimes, spilling all over the floor.

  So I might have bought rubber galoshes.

  I don’t blame anyone for Connie’s illness. I certainly don’t blame our folks. Our parents were farm people with little formal schooling, then employed in the sort of honest, endless work that requires wearing your name on your shirt and coming home tired with life. They did this since before Connie and I were born, just so we could exist.

  Dad lifted things for a living, in a rectangular cavern owned by General Motors. I tagged along once when I was six years old. I remember thinking that there was nothing to read and it smelled like a gas station.

  I also remember that the boxes were a hell of a lot bigger than Dad was. He never weighed more than 140 pounds in his life. I think our DNA must have included a few strands of ant.

  Most of the time, Dad had to be at work at a very early hour—something like 4:00 a.m. the previous Tuesday—and so had to be in bed sometime early in the previous month. When he was working second or third shift (or both; he was always working), he had to sleep in the daytime. Connie and I still have to play very, very quietly in the living room for at least another three or four years.

  Dad was a bright guy with virtually no education and no one who ever really encouraged him. So: two kids, house in the suburbs, play by the rules, and if that’s not enough, then it’s your own fault, and that’s why God made beer. But he had a silly and constant sense of humor. If you smile or even laugh sometimes while reading this book, in those moments you’re really seeing my dad. I promise.

  Up before dawn, mind-numbing days doing backbreaking work, home and in bed. And again. He did this, no exaggeration, for thirty-seven years. For my sister and me.


  I believe, although I cannot prove, that he had high hopes.

  Mom had a name tag, too. Hers was pinned to a smock handed to her by Newberry’s, a five-and-dime in a shopping mall surrounded by a half-mile rectangle of concrete.

  In the days before box stores replaced entire small towns, Newberry’s was the sort of place you’d run to three times a week, anytime you discovered you needed pliers, a Wiffle bat, a box of plastic party sporks, or perhaps a single staple.

  If you went in the doors closest to the 25¢ mechanical horsie, you’d find Mom at a cash register, talking with someone named Bea (or sometimes Ethel).

  Someone’s dog would be sleeping against one wall. No one would mind.

  You’d ask Mom about whatever item you were looking for—tea cozies, toy flutes, brake fluid, baby food, nine-volt batteries, fake vampire teeth, a protractor, baseball cards, or a Halloween mask of Harry Truman. And Mom would ask Bea (or sometimes Ethel) about it, and they would be certain your item was there somewhere.

  Wait—Lillian might know where it is. So they’d ask Betty—who was walking by holding a live snake from the pet department—if Lillian was back from lunch. Pretty soon, someone else named Eleanor was asking Doris to page Marian.

  About here, Olive would walk up, holding the same live snake from the pet department that Betty had, plus a large box of rubber balls. There would be no explanation.

  Doris would ask what’s going on, and then either Mom or Bea (or sometimes Ethel) would re-explain the saga in remarkable detail.

  An hour later—after you’d bought the item somewhere else, returned home, and ultimately installed it, worn it, or eaten it—you’d find yourself going back to Newberry’s, just out of curiosity.